Recently, I bought a wonderful standalone digital audio player, the xDuoo X3 II, from Massdrop. I could buy a 1TB SSD but, or I could replace the CD/DVD ROM drive so I can rip the occasional CD and create the occasional DVD-RW backup. Practically speaking, therefore, I'm going to be living with FLAC files on my laptop for now. If I moved from FLAC to WAV, that would more or less double the amount of space needed, which would leave me no room for work (or worse). That leaves me another 200GB for the system and my work, with a bit of a buffer. In total, this collection takes du -s -block-size=G MusicĢ37G of the 480GB provided by my SSD, 237GB is taken up by music. When I'm away I really enjoy listening to my music collection, which is mostly FLAC, quite a bit of it ripped from CDs, but also higher resolution stuff, generally up to 24-bit / 96 kHz pulse-code modulation (PCM) data, with a small scattering of MP3 files that were the only options for acquiring certain music. As far as I could determine at the time, my best bet, in terms of performance and reliability, was a SanDisk ExtremePro, which especially appealed to me because of the included 10-year warranty. Some years ago, I replaced the 500GB 7200RPM hard drive with a 480GB SSD. I do most of my day-to-day work on my fine, gracefully aging, System76 Gazelle laptop. Do we need compressed audio data?įor me, at least, the answer is a clear yes. These are all interesting points and well worthy of consideration.
As in this day and age there is no need to compress CD quality, then why bother? It may be worth having higher bitrate and depth on audio recording/processing, but for listening purposes, CD is as good as you need or indeed can get. In theory, FLAC doesn't, but the mere act of decompression can lead to jitter. MPEG adds features that can be identified with practice. Is there still any need for compressed data? As far as I can tell, no one has ever in a double-blind test been able to recognize anything better than CD-quality uncompressed audio. In response to a recent article, a reader wrote: